I agree to TechTarget’s Terms of Use, Privacy Policy, and the transfer of my information to the United States for processing to provide me with relevant information as described in our Privacy Policy.

Please check the box if you want to proceed.

I agree to my information being processed by TechTarget and its Partners to contact me via phone, email, or other means regarding information relevant to my professional interests. I may unsubscribe at any time.

Please check the box if you want to proceed.

By submitting my Email address I confirm that I have read and accepted the Terms of Use and Declaration of Consent.

on using that data to get an answer. That probably constitutes over 90% of the applications under development today.

Further, most of what you know about testing traditional applications doesn't apply to machine learning testing. In most testing situations, you seek to make sure that the actual output matches the expected one. With machine learning testing, looking for the right output is exactly the wrong approach. You will likely get a slightly different answer every time you enter the same data. But that doesn't make it wrong.

Instead, with machine learning testing, you have to have objective acceptance criteria that describe how close you have to come to the correct answer and provide a probability distribution. A medical diagnosis system will require higher accuracy than an e-commerce engine, for example.

This means that you have to have objective acceptance criteria before a line of code is written. Ironically, this means that you have to be more of a domain expert than a technical tester. With machine learning testing, you have to know the tolerances necessary in a successful application.

It also means that you need to have a fundamental understanding of mathematics and statistics. You need to be comfortable setting and measuring standard deviations and confidence intervals. If you've forgotten your college statistics, take a refresher to get ready for machine learning testing.

Lastly, you need a high-level understanding of the architecture of the machine learning system. You can't be uninformed as to how it was constructed. That's because, if a system isn't meeting its acceptance criteria, you have to give developers, data scientists and other stakeholders some intelligent reasons as to why that is happening. That is the only way any deficiencies can be addressed in machine learning testing.

1 comment

Register

Login

Forgot your password?

Your password has been sent to:

By submitting you agree to receive email from TechTarget and its partners. If you reside outside of the United States, you consent to having your personal data transferred to and processed in the United States. Privacy